


Holy night

by zmeischa



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fandom Kombat 2012, Gen, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-14
Updated: 2012-12-14
Packaged: 2017-11-21 03:04:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/592722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zmeischa/pseuds/zmeischa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A wounded captain and a nurse</p>
            </blockquote>





	Holy night

Thanks to darkling, my wonderful beta.

“I hate night shifts,” says Jayne Poole and yawns. “This is the third time the Queen puts me to nights. A bitch, ain’t she?”

“If you ask me,” says Sansa and yawns, “if you ask me, I’d rather take three night shifts than one amputation. Where? Is? My? Pinafore?”

“Have you looked in the dresser?”

“I just did, it's not there. Oh, here it is, I ironed it after the shift and hung it on the chair”

“Had my father seen you ironing your own clothes, he’d have had a heart attack.”

“It’s a blessing he’s never going to see what I washed from this apron yesterday.” Sansa sighs. “We are at war, after all. Your hair came out of your kerchief, do something.”

There are two nurses smoking near the hospital entrance. 

“A cig?” offers Nurse Shae. Sansa refuses, Jayne takes one. 

“A candy?” asks chubby Nurse Stockwell. “My mum sent me a parcel yesterday; I’ll burst if I eat it all by myself.”

“No, you won’t,” says Nurse Shae derisively, “you gobbled the last one and never winced.” 

Nurse Stockwell pouts and starts to blink, getting ready to cry. How could this plump and lazy crybaby be at the Red Cross? She is afraid of blood, she openly holds her nose during bandages, she falls asleep at night-shifts and forgets to do the injections. Besides, Nurse Shae, not less lazy but much more devious, lumbers her own duties on her. 

“Oh, stop whining,” she says with disgust. “If the Queen sees you whimpering, she’ll give you the wigging of your life. I say, Sansa, are you really a duchess?”

Sansa gives Jayne a reproachful look. 

“No, I’m not.”

Nurse Shae snorts, Jayne widens her eyes. 

“Being duke’s daughter doesn’t make you a duchess,” explains Sansa reluctantly. 

“You mean your gov’nor is really a duke? How is that for a lark! The Queen will lose her knickers when she finds out. You mean he is just called ‘Duke Stark’ or what?”

“His Grace Duke of Winterfell,” Sansa corrects her softly. She swallows the second part of the sentence: “That was his name before he died”. 

“So how should we call you now?” asks Nurse Stockwell. “My lady duchess?”

“You should call me ‘Nurse Stark’.”

“The Queen!” hisses Nurse Shae. All three put out their cigarettes and throw them away. 

Mrs. Lannister, head nurse of Casterly hospital, slowly floats along the corridor: white shoes, starched dress, golden hair crowned with a lacy headdress, evil green eyes. Mrs. Lannister is the terror of the hospital. The head doctor finishes his orders with words: “If Mrs. Lannister doesn’t mind, naturally”. Nurses call her “the Queen”. 

The Queen sniffs majestically.

“How strange,” she says in a gentle voice, “I’d swear I can smell cigarettes.” 

“It’s probably from the corridor,” suggests Nurse Shae intrepidly. Jayne and Nurse Stockwell both make terrified curtsies.

“It should be,” agrees the grand Mrs. Lannister. “If not, I would be forced to think that you girls smoke in defiance of my direct orders, and such a suggestion would be absurd, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, Mrs. Lannister,” whispers Jayne deferentially. 

“Well, I suppose you all have duties to perform. Nurse Stark, your burned dog threw a plate at the day nurse. Take measures, if you please.”

The lacy headdress floats away along the corridor. 

“Don’t call him that,” says Sansa softly. 

She goes to the dressing room, takes some bandages and ointment for burns, goes one floor up and enters a small single ward. 

“Look who deigned to join me”, captain Clegane welcomes her. 

There are other prisoners of war at the Casterly hospital – the Red Cross takes care of everyone – but, that being an officers’ hospital, most of them speak some English. Captain Clegane stubbornly sticks to his German. When he tries to be amiable – that is, almost never – he speaks a decent Hochdeutsch, when he is angry or in pain – that is, nearly always – he reverts to Bavarian dialect. 

“Good evening”, Sansa says cheerfully in German and picks the urinal from under his bed. 

“One day you’ll break your spine, mind my words,” captain Clegane warns her as she clenches her teeth, lifts him up and puts the urinal under him. Every day Sansa lifts, overturns and helps scores of men from hospital bed to gurney, and she has long known that skill is more important than force, but Clegane is huge. They had to break of the back of the hospital bed to put him into it, and the sleeves of his pajamas are ripped up at the seams to allow for his biceps. “I wonder if all his parts are that big,” giggles Nurse Shay. Sansa says nothing. She sees the part of male anatomy in question on a daily basis (it’s hard to believe she had never seen a tieless man before the war), but captain Clegane does have reasons to be conceited. 

“What are you staring at?” he grumbles. “Expect me to lay a golden, do you?”

Sansa turns to the wall obediently. There is a tickling behind her back. “What would Miss Mordane say?” she wonders. Miss Mordane, their governess, considered even the expression “call of nature” to be intolerably vulgar, you had to say that you needed to “adjust your hair”. Anyway, Miss Mordane is a nurse in a hospital in France now and must carry her own share of full urinals. 

“And now let’s change those bandages,” she says in a steady voice. That is the most horrible part of her day. Sansa would have gladly assisted at amputations or explained the presence of lip-salve in her personal belongings to Mrs. Lannister all day long, if only she could avoid changing those particular bandages. 

She unwinds them from his face, layer by layer. Everyone says she has a magic touch at nursing, but captain Clegane seems to be of a different opinion. 

“You idiot!” he yells. “Ham-fisted bitch!”

Sansa gently takes the last layer of bandaged from the burned flesh. The right side of Clegane’s face is ordinary, homely but attractive in a way. The mask of red and black on the left side is horrible, a mass of caked blood crisscrossed by knotty scars. His left ear is nothing but a stump, his hair is burned, his scull is covered by healing scabs. Once, when she was a little girl, Sansa’s elder brother was careless enough to explain to her the meaning of word “scalping”, and she had two weeks of nightmares. This face is a hundred times more terrifying than the worst of her childhood’s nightmares. 

She shines a light into the grey eye surrounded by serpentine scars. 

“Excellent,” she says cheerfully, “this eye is going function as well as the other.”

“And what shall I look at?” enquires Clegane. “My celestial beauty, p’haps? With a mug like mine, the most important thing is the good eyesight, right?”

“Scars are a man’s best ornament”, says Sansa in a steady voice.

Clegane coughs and spits on the floor. 

“Well, if I’m so handsome why don’t you give me a kiss then?”

Sansa imagines these burnt lips touching her mouth and barely keeps herself from vomiting. 

“That would not be hygienic.”

“Fuck off.”

She sighs and opens a jar of ointment. 

She had such charming dreams when she enrolled at the nurses’ courses: herself in white like an angel of mercy, mopping the brow of a wounded warrior, preferably an elder son of a duke or an earl, or writing a letter to his elderly mother, because he is suffering from a sword wound in his right shoulder. A sword wound, for goodness’s sake! 

The burnt mask slowly disappears under the layers of bandages. 

“If you don’t wanna kiss me,” says Clegane peacefully, “why don’t you sing to me, at least?”

Sansa nods, as if it were the most natural request in the world, and starts to sing:

“Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht!”

The hospital and the rude man in the hospital bed fade away at the second line of the song. She is at Winterfell again, sitting at the piano, wearing the blue gown and mama’s diamond diadem. Papa is holding a glass of champagne and smiling, younger brothers play with puppies on the floor, Jayne, in her best apron and headdress, peeps from behind the door. Mama softly sings along. 

“You fool,” rasps Clegane, “Christmas is six month off.”

For some reason Sansa believes he is crying.


End file.
